I just fired up the project I've been editing on a 3-year 2 x 3 GHz QUad-Core Intel Xeon old MacPro, which I upgraded with a Quadro 4000 a few weeks ago to get the benefits of the Mercury Playback Engine, and got a message saying that the last time I opened this project I was on a Mercury enabled machine, but now I'm not so it's opening my project up in "software only" mode. Weird because of course it's the same machine both times. The Mercury box in the "project settings" menu is grayed out set to "software only" so there's no manually changing it.

The only two things that I have changed on my system since yesterday are

the nVidia 4000 for the Mac card support of GPU acceleration in Premiere. Here's why:

My Intel Mac 3,1 was running Premiere beautifully - I did NOT get sucked into installing FCPX.

When I booted up my machine this morning, "Software Update" told me I need to install the update of operating system 10.6.8 for many security reasons and bug fixes which is why I did so - appeared very urgent, especially to protect against a new named virus attacking Apple machines.

I immediately had all kinds of funkiness - sluggish operation, Firefox and Safarie freezing requiring force quits, Premiere lost it's GPU acceleration ability (all greyed out and not an option any longer - old projects or new projects - no longer a selectable choice)

For kicks, I tried to open good old FCP7, and whalah - error message pops up stating that my "graphics card did not meet the requirements for running FCP7" and it also wrongly showed I had a graphics card with "0 Vram installed"

After searching around the web, I started finding all the horror stories about 10.6.8. Found the info that nVidia had sometime today (6-24-11) posted a new driver for this specific card to fix issues with 10.6.8 which just came out. After installing the new nVidia driver needed for 10.6.8 and this graphics card, all funkieness went away... Firefox and Safari worked fine, sluggishness went away, and FCP7 worked fine as before. B U T Premiere GPU accleration was STILL broken.

Apple has broken their competitor - surely they would have tested one of the few major graphics cards that work in the Mac version of Adobe Premiere.

Apple made sure that nVidia had a new driver for THEIR combinations of nVidia Quadro 4000 for the Mac and FCP7 and X ... but not for Adobe Premiere.

Hopefully Adobe will jump on this quickly. I think it is clear something foul is afoot!

The Same thing happened to me. I upgraded to Mac OS X Version 10.6.8 from 10.6.7, earlier today. I was in the middle of working on a project for a client in Adobe Premiere Pro CS5. I have a Nvida Quadro 4000 graphics card. After I updated my system Mac OS X 10.6.8, Premiere pro stopped recognizing my graphics card. I called Adobe and they said that no one else is having this problem. Obvisoly this is an issue for many other Premiere Pro CS 5 and CS 5.5 users. I have the updated Nvida Quadro drivers for my graphics card but still the problem persists.

When I open a project in Premiere Pro I get the following message:

"This project was last used with Mercury Playback Engine GPU Acceleration, which is not available on this system. Mercury Playback Engine Software Only will be used".

This is a huge problem for me. I work in high definition AVCHD format. I can't even preview my work, let alone edit it without my graphics card functioning properly with Premiere Pro. Everything was working fine until I updated to Mac OS X 10.6.8. Like I said, I have the latest drivers installed from Nvidia. If anyone out there knows how to fix this, I would be so appreciative.

And to be honest, Adobe was not very helpful in trouble shooting this issue with me. I sat on hold for over an hour with Adobe customer service just to be told that no one else is having this problem but me...lol. If I can't resolve this in a timely manner then Final Cut Pro X here I come. Peace out Adobe Premiere Pro.

The problem is definitely not related to FCPX. I don't have FCPX but will very soon if I can not resolve this. Although I hear there are a lot of bugs in the new Final cut, at least I have apple care and don't have to sit on hold for almost two hours just to be told that the issue I am having is all in my head. Unreal.

I have:

Nvidia Quadro 4000

CUDA Driver Version: 4.0.17

GPU Driver Version: 1.6.37.0 (256.02.25f01)

Everything worked great until I updated my Mac OS X system to 10.6.8. Now the Mercury box in the "project settings" menu is grayed out and set to "software only" with no way to change it.

Thank you for acknowledging our issues regarding the incompatibility with Mac OS X 5.6.8 and Nvidia graphics cards while working within Premiere Pro CS 5 & Premiere Pro CS 5.5. How do we fix this??

I have already updated my Nvidia Quadro 4000 graphics drivers to the current versions and still the problem persists. It seems that Premiere Pro CS5 & CS5.5 does not work with Nvidia Quadro graphics cards on Mac OS X 10.6.8.

**ALL GRAPHICS DRIVERS ON MY SYSTEM FOR THE NVIDIA QUADRO 4000 HAVE BEEN UPDATED TO THE CURRENT VERSION:

CUDA Driver Version: 4.0.17

GPU Driver Version: 1.6.37.0 (256.02.25f01)

My system specs:

Mac OS X Version 10.6.8

Processor: 2 x 2.4 GHz Quad-Core intel Xeon

Memory: 24 GB 1066 MHz DDR3

Graphics Card: Nvidia Quadro 4000

- CUDA Driver Version: 4.0.17

- GPU Driver Version: 1.6.37.0 (256.02.25f01)

At this point many of us are stuck in a very bad situation with deadlines to meet. What is the next step? Is there a fix for this? When will there be one.

I can understand your frustration after the response you got from tech support, but I don't think Adobe is the originator of our problem here.

As you and I both reported, Premiere was working perfectly with the nVidia Quadro 4000 for the Mac graphics card UNTIL the moment of Apple's 10.6.8 operating system update. It was at that very moment things went wonky.

Even Apple's own apps went wonky suddenly after 10.6.8.

Then suddenly, on the same day as Apple's 10.6.8 there is a new nVidia driver for this particular graphics card that fixes the issues with FCP7 and apparently FCPX as reported in this thread. But not Adobe Premiere CS5.5.

So it would seem pretty clear that Apple and/or nVidia made changes that broke the working GPU acceleration in Adobe who had made no changes.

The reports I have been reading about 10.6.8 is that it supposedly has better implementation of graphics card OpenCL support. The nVidia Quadro 4000 for the Mac new driver (new as of just yesterday) also talks about better implementation.

The problem for us folks with CS5 and 5.5 is that it is going to take Adobe working with Apple and nVidia to figure out what they changed that zapped the Adobe apps. And I get the clear feeling that Apple isn't that supportive of the competiting (and current champion) Adobe applications.

In my mind, Apple has given themselves some real black eyes with FCP X and now their problematic 10.6.8 update.

Todd Kopriva has been extremely active helping people with their problems. Think he is one of the good guys and will be active with this. He was working at home at night on a problem I had not very long ago. And this issue just started yesterday so give them a little time to figure out what others did to their working app.

I hear you.. I have been a loyal adobe disciple since prior to CS2 when Macromedia owned Dreamweaver and Flash. I don't mean to come off as nasty and direct, but the frustration that this has caused me has sent my blood pressure through the roof. And the response that I got from customer service set me off in a big way and made my blood boil.

Now I have to go and process a refund to an aggravated client of mine that expected his video footage to be finished being edited today. At this point I was forced to download FCPX from the app store. I will miss working natively with AVCHD video without having to transcode it, but what else can I do. With my graphics card out of the mix, I can't even preview my video in Premiere.

The only thing that I can think of doing in order to put a bandaid on the problem is to rollback my system to Mac OS X 10.6.7 from the current version 10.6.8 until this is all figured out.

I hate not running the current version of OS X but what else can I do to fix the problem. What aggravates me even more, is that by Apple not playing nicely with others, all it does is make it harder for artists and developers to establish a more seamless workflow. I guess it's all about market share and industry domination. Whatever..

All I know is that I hope that this gets figured out very soon as I am very comfortable in Adobe Premiere Pro, as well as AE and several other Adobe applications.

I'm cool with Adobe. I just want this resolved immediately. From my perspective, Nvidia uses the acceleration benefits that are apparent in Adobe products as a selling point for their graphics cards. Nvidia must have some obligation to Adobe to help get this resolved. Then again what the heck do I know. Not for nothing, but I don't care about these details. I just hope this gets fixed before I get too comfortable in FCPX.

I'm having the same issues on 10.6.8 breaking the CUDA support on both Premiere Pro and Davinci Resolve. Even with the new Quadro 4000 driver. Hopefully this fix is just Adobe coming out with a new CUDA support driver.

Someone posted a workaround where you roll back the Nvidia driver to the March release, and Mercury GPU acceleration comes back online for 10.6.8. HOWEVER I have noted a performance hit from my last edits, as noted on that thread. Here's a copy/paste of my observations:

Successfully rolled back to the March drivers ... Thank you! Premiere shows Mercury GPU acceleration back online, HOWEVER I see a performance hit from where we were. I just loaded several projects that used to play at full frame rate (or close to), now getting more dropped frames. Not so obvious on straight DSLR footage, but there's definitely some frame sticking that wasn't there before, particularly obvious on cuts. Another project I have features multiple flying titles on layers and nested sequences utilizing Premiere's Move/Scale, Basic 3D and Proc Amp effects. Playback is definitely faster than CPU-only (I have a Mac Pro w/ dual 2.93 Xeons) but seems less "smooth" than it was. Hard to compare... Anyone else experiencing GPU performance differences?

Just want to make sure Nvidia knows this workaround is not 100% fixing the problem.

If you need to roll back, you have to manually install each package as the installer will say "No Driver Update Needed" ... Here's how:

1. Open the package in Finder (right click and "Show Package Contents")

2. There will be 3 packages inside, Display, Driver and Opengl, install each of them reboot.

Visit the Nvidia thread http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=203839 for more info. I'd also like to encourage anyone who sees a similar performance hit to post their findings both here at Adobe and on Nvidia's site. I'd test more, got to get back to real work for now. Hope this helps everyone out so we can all get back up and running.

Thanks for the info on a workaround, but as stated that by no means is a solution.

I hope that Adobe and nVidia will find a way to sort this out very soon and hopefully figure out how to prevent this with future updates from Apple. I don't want to go through this every time Apple decides to update OSX. That would be just plain ridiculous and unprofessional.

Okay guys will someone check this out for me? I upgraded to the newest drivers this morning, however now I'm seeing a MAJOR bug with a simple dissolve transition in Mercury GPU acceleration... Test this out please:

1. Add footage to the timeline (In my case HDV) and edit a cut between two clips.

2. Apply a dissolve transition between them with Mercury GPU on... on my system it's just a cut.

Hey folks I was caught editing all day long and had to do several workarounds to finish due to my continuing problem with dissolves in a Mercury GPU accelerated project. This repeatable has occurred - or at least I started noticing it - only after I updated to the latest Nvidia drivers for OSX. I was able to create a small project that duplicates the problem… Could anyone load this up and tell me if this is repeatable on their machine?

In this test project, the problem occurs twice. Once at 7:20 and again at 8:13. Look close and you'll see the dissolve is mistakenly fading to the previous clip, then hard-cutting to the next. It's easy to spot, unless my system is the only one creating this error. My email is churchillstudios@aol.com and studio line is 901-754-6675 if you have any direct questions. Please advise … and thanks!!

I didn't run into the dissolve problem, but I tried the new drivers and soon the troubles started with my Magic Bullet plugins.

I applied Looks to some HDSLR footage, no problems, then I added Denoiser and the whole thing went pear-shaped. I started getting errors that wouldn't go away and eventually it crashed Premiere. It seems there are still lots of problems with these new drivers.

Hi Marcus did you use the test project off my FTP? I'd be interested to see if this is unique to my system, or something others may have to watch out for. I've failed to mention that most dissolves on the timeline work, then something in Mercury GPU acceleration breaks two of them. I have Colorista II and will run it thru some tests as well.

Film Dissolve does not fix the problem I'm afraid. Just tried it out.... Additive, Cross and Film Dissolves all create the same bug. In testing other real time effects, I noticed that the dissolve problem can be worked around by placing a "Noise" effect on a clip that leads into a problem dissolve.... In other words place a Noise effect (no need to mess with the settings) on the first clip right before the buggy dissolve, and poof: it will "fixes" the issue. Not sure how well this workaround is since "Noise" is not YUV or 32 bit. Hope this helps.

Thanks Brian, I can confirm your bug and will work on a fix, but obviously cannot commit to any timeframe. The workaround you mention of placing an accelerated effect on one end will work fine, and any accelerated effect that by default doesn't render such as fast color corrector should do. Note that your comment about Noise not being YUV or 32 bit isn't quite correct. The badges are for the software capabilities and all CUDA effects, such as noise, are always 32-bit float even when the software effect isn't.

Thanks Steve. Good news is it looks like we've got a viable workaround for this strange dissolve problem. So I take it this was not a result of the CUDA update? (If so, sorry for the threadjack; I hadn't noticed the problem until now.) Can you share more information as to what causes the bug by e-mail or perhaps on a separate thread? Also, I'd love to read more info on how accelerated effects are always 32 bit, even if they aren't marked that way.

What Display card driver and Cuda driver do you all suggest if you haven't moved to 10.6.8? I am on 10.6.7, and with all the problems 10.6.8 is causing, plan to stay there. I have a Mid 2010 Mac Pro 5.1 (latest) Hexacore Westmere 3.33 Ghz with Mac GTX 285 EVGA ready to install. Radeon 5870 at present. Both Premiere 5.0.4 and 5.5. Is the March release the best for this combo, both for display and Cuda? Please be as specific as possible.